Before 1987
Ra Uru Hu was born Robert Allan Krakower in Montreal in April 1948. He studied arts at university and worked in advertising, publishing and media production in Canada. In 1983 he left that life, travelled, and settled on Ibiza, a small island off the coast of Spain, where he lived simply and for a time taught school. By his own account he was not looking for anything spiritual and had no particular interest in esoteric systems.
The Encounter
On the evening of 3 January 1987 he had an experience he never fully found ordinary words for. For eight days and nights he described being addressed by what he called the Voice, an intelligence that dictated a detailed account of how the universe works and, with it, the complete structure of the Human Design System: the wheel, the BodyGraph, the Centers, the Gates and the mechanics of the imprint. He came out of it with a new name and spent the next several years testing what he had received against real charts before he was willing to teach it.
Human Design notes that in the same season a supernova appeared in the southern sky, the brightest in nearly four hundred years, and that its neutrinos were detected on Earth. The system holds the two as a single arrival.
The Teaching Years
From the early 1990s Ra taught, first in Europe and then around the world, recording thousands of hours of lectures. He founded the Jovian Archive to hold and publish the material and the International Human Design School to train analysts and teachers, and he developed a detailed professional curriculum covering everything from the basic reading to business and relationship analysis. He was blunt, funny and often uncompromising as a teacher, and he insisted throughout that the system was there to be lived, and that living it was the proof. He died at home on Ibiza on 12 March 2011, a few weeks short of his sixty-third birthday.
What He Left
Ra wrote a fresh set of descriptions for all 384 Lines of the I Ching, known as the Rave I Ching, and shaped the language of keynotes that the whole system speaks in. The Definitive Book of Human Design, written with Lynda Bunnell and published in 2011, was the last major work completed with his involvement and is the standard reference. The pages on this site are written in my own words, drawing on that lineage of teaching, so that the mechanics are accurate without reproducing anyone's text.
Reading Him Now
Ra never claimed to understand how the Voice came to him, only to have received something complete and coherent, and he spent the next twenty-four years passing it on. The invitation he left is simple: get your chart, live your Strategy and Authority, and watch your life change.